Stuff that makes me fly off the handle:

1. My grandfather was a full-blooded Kiowa Indian born in 1866.

   The Kiowa have long been a small tribe. Our Kiowa language is in the Tanoan family which includes Tiwa, Tewa, Towa and other languages of the Puebloan tribes. Tanoan descends from the Uto-Aztecan family, and even today the Kiowa know the Yaqui of Sonora as our cousins. Other ancient cousins include the Taos, Tigua, Jumano, Paiute, Mono, Shoshoni, Comanche, Kawaiisu, Chemehuevi, Tubatulabal, Hopi, Cahuilla, Luiseno, Juaneno, Pima Bajo, O’odham, Opata, Tepehuan, Tarahumare, Mayo, Huichol, Cora, Nahuatl, and Pipil. Some of these tribes descend from our progenitors, the Hisatsinom. They were once called the “Anasazi”, but this term is an offensive Navaho term that means “enemy” and should not be used.

   We Kiowa split off and headed North sometime around 1100-1300 when the Hisatsinom moved out from our advanced cities such as Chaco, Mesa Verde, and hundreds of other metropolii. For some time we lived in the Yellowstone region of Wyoming, and Tsait Kopeta (Bear Mountain) became an important place.

   Many of our cousins retained the Puebloan culture, but we Kiowa left to create and subdue the Great Plains from the forest state it was previously in. This was done through the most radical and large-scale program of land-repurposing and domination ever accomplished in human history. Our work created convenient hunting grounds, specifically engineered to nurture a plethora of game. In fact, even today, many Kiowa are accomplished engineers and renowned artists.

   After centuries of mastering the plains, the Kiowa met a new group in the Dakotas region — the Eastern Seaboard tribe, the Sioux, had been driven West to escape the Iroquois’ unusual Resistance-is-Futile Plan of Global Tribal Assimilation. We Kiowas moved south, returning to Texas and Oklahoma, which was already territory we covered in our continual long ranging nomadic jaunts and excursions. Interestingly, those Dakota Sioux largely abandoned all of their ancient tribal practices from when they were a fishing tribe living in pine needle huts on the East coast and adopted the Kiowa religion, beliefs and much of our culture and practices enthusiastically. Mi takuye oyasin.

   My grandfather and his friends spent their youth roaming around the plains and hunting buffalo. They would also on occasion take off all their clothes as was their custom and slaughter whites that they encountered. Our tribe killed more white men than any other tribe. We try to get along, but when people are here to murder us and steal our belongings, we have a right to defend ourselves from the war criminals.

   My dad was a roamer his whole life and never stayed in one place for long. I don’t move around as much anymore. I have my own personal territory here which I protect fiercely.

   Now, notice that nowhere have I mentioned anything about living on a reservation. I wasn’t raised on a reservation somewhere and neither was my father. If you want me to fly off the handle, tell me that I am not a real Indian because I wasn’t raised on the reservation. I will tell you that actually I was raised in the real Indian lifestyle of roaming around and moving constantly. Life on the reservation/concentration camps has as little to do with traditional Indian culture as life in internment camps has to do with traditional Japanese culture. Would you claim that Japanese people who have not been through the internment camp experience are not “real Japanese” people? Do you see how not just idiotic but repulsive such an argument is? Would you perhaps claim that black people who do not live on a plantation picking cotton are not “real black” people? Or that only Jews who suffer in concentration camps are “real Jews.” I have to wonder when will these stereotypes be put behind us, as well as the absurd requirements that one must continue to be actively imprisoned or enslaved in order to claim one’s racial or cultural identity. I’m not some quaint relic from the past that dresses in a cute outfit and behaves in a predictable manner according to some archaic racist phantasies. I’m a proud red man and if you do me wrong I’ll track you down. On the other hand, if you share my values, you may have made a friend.

   You may be able to guess from this what I think about claims that the only real Indian music involves solo flute, skin drum and a tortoise shell rattle. Such a claim is a racist demand that we lead quaint lives in accordance with your phantasies. In addition, these are ritual instruments which are not used in commercial recordings anyway, so expecting to find them is hoping to get us to engage in sacrilege.

2. I’ve got all these books with stories transcribed from members of my tribe and others. All of them say “Copyright University of Oklahoma” or “Copyright Joe WhiteMan”. These white people wrote down our stories and then claimed ownership of our stories. That’s beyond stealing. That’s reprehensible. Are you listening you thieving scuzzbags at the University of Oklahoma, Pantheon and Dover books who have raped my people’s own heritage? Who gave you permission to commit this crime? I ask these criminals who hold these illegal copyrights to return to us what has been stolen.
    
3. People like to go on about how our tribes were communal societies in which everything was shared and there was no concept of property ownership. This is absolutely utter nonsense. It is a lie deliberately invented and maintained by the white man to justify his theft of our resources and property.

   The lie works as follows: “Those savage indians are so primitive that they have no laws and they don’t comprehend or believe in ownership like us enlightened Europeans. Therefore, there is no loss to them if we take their property because they don’t believe in ownership. We need feel no guilt over this because what they have is not construed as property by their communist society. Besides, our god has given us their land, their crops, their women, their songs and their stories to do with as we please. Our god has given us dominion over all animals, including the indians. It is a scientific fact known to all respected scientists that cranium measurements of the red man has proven beyond all question that these pathetic, property-less creatures are not human, but a lower evolved animal. It is our natural right, upheld by the Supreme Court of our land, to dominate them and our responsibility to steward the land and resources upon which they ignorantly squat, starving if it were not for the crumbs we occasionally throw their way out of pity.”

   Let me tell you this is a garbage argument used to steal and it has always been a garbage argument used to steal. Let me tell you what would happen to you in the old days if you decided to sing a song written by someone else. What would happen is, he would kill you. And if he wasn’t still around, his family would kill you. And if his family could not be found, your own tribe would cast you out and refuse to speak to you for dishonoring him in this way. We didn’t have copyright law, but we sure did believe that creative art works belonged to the person to whom they were revealed by the spirits. For someone else to steal that gift was one of the worst things possible and was a grave offense against the spiritual world. It was the prerogative of any one who was so guided to, to give a revealed song to another, or to give it to the tribe for all with the right understanding. But without that explicit permission, the song was to die with its author, never to be sung again. This was a matter of respect of not just the artist, but of the intentions of the sources of the art. This same law applies to stories, just as it applies to secret knowledge. Those who try to steal such things are to be killed for their offense and good riddance to them. This is the way it was and I tend to think it was a very good system.

4. Mexicans are Native American Indians. Does that surprise you? Well it’s true. So why do people have problems with allowing my Indian brothers to come and go from this country? This land belongs to us and not to the white man. The Kickapoo tribe was relocated from Wisconsin to Mexico. Now they are called “illegal aliens”. How can they be aliens? They were here thousands of years before the white man. It is the white who is the illegal alien.
    
5. How would you feel about having Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot or Hitler on your currency? Probably not very good because these are all psychopathic killers and scheming madmen. America too was once dishonored by a psychopathic leader as well — US President Andrew Jackson. In a turnaround from Jefferson’s peaceful relationship with Indigenous Nations of America, the racist psychopath Jackson issued the Indian Removal Act, which began decades of vicious genocide of the innocent natives of this continent. This includes the cannibalism of Indian children by the white man and the rape then murder of tens of thousands of Indian women. All architected by one of history’s most notorious and brutal killers, Andrew Jackson. That the vile image featuring the beady eyes of this lunatic is on the twenty-dollar bill is not just disgraceful and an insult to humanity, but cheapens and degrades everything about this country. Please contact your Congressman and demand the removal of the deranged tyrant Jackson from all currency, and ask that the portraits of this unrepentant rapist and cannibal be removed from the Whitehouse and other locations in the US capitol.
    
6. Brave? Strong? Warriors? You betcha. I’m glad that winning sports teams and powerful military hardware are named after our tribes. White people don’t have to protect us from these things because we don’t find them offensive. We do find it offensive that white people think we are not intelligent enough to have our own opinions about things.